Word: nano
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...operating loss in decades. Tata Motors, India's largest automaker, is not immune. Sales of its commercial vehicles and cars have slumped, and debt from the company's purchase last year of luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover is weighing on Tata Motors' balance sheet. Tata argues that the Nano is exactly the right car for these difficult times. "If I had conceived a million-dollar supercar today, I think you'd have every reason to question whether that's the right product at the right time in the planet that we are living in," Tata told TIME during...
...path that Tata Motors has followed to bring the Nano from sketchpad to showroom may prove to be much more important than its price tag. The company's engineers and parts suppliers started from scratch, rethinking every component to minimize cost and weight without sacrificing basic performance, comfort and style. As battered carmakers search for new business models to adapt to shifting, shrinking consumer demand, the Nano may point the way to the future - one that will likely revolve around smaller, more fuel-efficient and more cheaply produced vehicles. (See pictures of the Nano...
...Quest to Get More from Less The Nano is about as basic as transportation gets. It rolls on tiny 12-in. wheels, the tires have no inner tubes, the windshield has just a single wiper and drivers must make do with one side mirror. But it's not simply a stripped-down car. The shell was designed to be rigid with less material, and the body panels are made out of Japanese and Korean steel, giving the exterior a high-gloss look and feel. Delphi designed a streamlined instrument cluster that weighs just 14 oz. (400 g), compared...
...which has four doors and seats four adults, doesn't feel like a lightweight on the road. I drove one on an empty test track at Tata Motors' main plant in the western Indian city of Pune and found that, while the interior is spartan, the Nano handles as well as any of the other low-end minicars available in India. The brakes lack feel and there's little storage space, but the car turned heads. Our photographer drove a bright yellow Nano - this one fully equipped with air-conditioning - through the highways, cobbled avenues and side streets of Pune...
...Margins Are Small, Too Not much marketing will be needed to sell the Nano to aspiring Indians like the ones I met in Pune. Indians buy about 1.4 million cars and 7 million two-wheelers a year. Even if the Nano initially grabs just a fraction of this market, as Tata executives expect, demand will outstrip the current annual production capacity of 45,000 cars - meaning there will likely be long waiting lists and disappointed customers. But Tata Motors can't make more Nanos due to a controversy over construction of what was to be the Nano's main factory...